In a recent article published by the Law Journal, in the Employment Law special section on March 14, the author astonishingly opines that the enactment of N.J.S.A. 10:5-12.8 (a), which prohibits confidentiality agreement in settlement agreements in discrimination lawsuits, has resulted in a chilling effect on settlements. Nothing could be farther from the truth, and the author utterly failed to provide any statistics supporting his outlandish assertion.

Clearly employers (who he and his firm represent) always want their settlements to be confidential. Why expose the unlawful acts of their company to the world at large? Why expose an executive of the company who routinely subjects his female employees to unwarranted comments and advances? The fact is that the purpose for making these settlements public is to prevent future bad conduct. Imagine if all the settlements paid out to the victims of Roger Ailes, Bill O'Reilly and Matt Lauer were made public from the first settlement. Those individuals would have been fired long ago. Individuals such as Gretchen Carlson would never have had to suffer from the pain and humiliation that they [she] did, let alone the damage to her career. A defense lawyer who opposed the bill, the current President of the New Jersey State Bar Association, admitted during a panel discussion at the bar convention last May that he was wrong; he agreed that the bill that prohibits discriminators and harassers from silencing their victims has not had a negative impact settlements.

It is even more disturbing that the author incorrectly cited a dead bill and misrepresented both the substance and intent of the bill. Assembly Bill No. 4637 died at the end of the 2020-2021 session, without even having been heard in Committee. The Senate version, S3352 was reported from the Senate Labor Committee, but also died without a Senate vote. The bill has been reintroduced this session as A1691. It has not yet been reintroduced in the Senate. This bill, originally sponsored by employee rights champion Senator Loretta Weinberg (now retired), seeks to strengthen the Law Against Discrimination, not weaken it.